This article includes 10 skills to learn to be successful. I'm focusing on the asking good questions:

"Good questions are ships that sail us into discovering lands and that can open up the opportunity to uncover things we would have never imagined... unless we asked."

Source: Robin Good

Why

Asking questions is the highway to learning and understanding more about the world that surrounds you, about how it works and about how to get anywhere you want to go, physically or mentally.

Learning to ask good questions is also important because it trains you to evaluate the situation, to analyze its weak or unclear points and to see clearly where is the extra information that you do not have and need to know.

How:

Learn and practice the use of the 5 Ws. These are questions whose answers are considered basic in information-gathering. They are often mentioned in journalism (cf. news style), research, and police investigations. They constitute a formula for getting the complete story on a subject.

Judith E. Glaser, author of Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking and Build a Healthy Thriving Organization, introduces a passage illuminating the drivers of success from Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through...

Beth Kanter's insight:

Summarizes the research on growth vs fixed mindsets from Carol Dweck and others.

"The real secret of success resides in people’s mind-set. He shows how a “fixed” mind-set that ascribes success to innate qualities is less resilient and adaptable than a “growth” mind-set that connects achievement to continuous learning and persistence

Summarizes the research on growth vs fixed mindsets from Carol Dweck and others.

"The real secret of success resides in people’s mind-set. He shows how a “fixed” mind-set that ascribes success to innate qualities is less resilient and adaptable than a “growth” mind-set that connects achievement to continuous learning and persistence."

FailCon 2013 FailCon has traveled around the world, visiting over a dozen countries since its inception in 2009. Now we're back in our home city of San Francisco to teach new lessons, focus on the best stories of the...

Why don't successful people and organizations automatically become very successful?

Beth Kanter's insight:

If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the "undisciplined pursuit of more," then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to cut out really terrific opportunities as well. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones.

Asking One of your direct reports walks into your office looking for help: the rollout of the new line of Web-based products she is managing is falling behind schedule. All the prototypes have been create...

Beth Kanter's insight:

Asking good questions Framework.

The most effective and empowering questions create value in one or more of the following ways:

They create clarity: “Can you explain more about this situation?”

They construct better working relations: Instead of “Did you make your sales goal?” ask, “How have sales been going?”

They help people think analytically and critically: “What are the consequences of going this route?”

They inspire people to reflect and see things in fresh, unpredictable ways: “Why did this work?”

They encourage breakthrough thinking: “Can that be done in any other way?”

They challenge assumptions: “What do you think you will lose if you start sharing responsibility for the implementation process?”

They create ownership of solutions: “Based on your experience, what do you suggest we do here?”

What not to ask Marquardt points out that, contrary to the business truism “There are no bad questions,” several types of questions can have a negative effect on subordinates.

Questions focused on why a person did not or cannot succeed force subordinates to take a defensive or reactive stance and strip them of their power. Such questions shut down opportunities for success and do not allow people to clarify misunderstandings or achieve goals. These questions include:

Hirschman made his arguments without mathematical formulas or complex models. His subject was economics, but his spirit was literary.

Beth Kanter's insight:

Albert O. HIrschman was a economist. This essay by Malcolm Gladwell shares stories of his life and philosophy about doubt, creativity, and failure.

Great storytelling, but some juicy bits about failure.

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede—in fact we find it intolerable to imagine—that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning. . . . Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

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